Kanada kann sich nicht allein auf Pipelines verlassen – es ist Zeit, die Innovation zu skalieren
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/alice-de-koning-and-yrjo-koskinen-canada-cant-rely-on-pipelines-alone-its-time-to-scale-up-innovation
Kanada kann sich nicht allein auf Pipelines verlassen – es ist Zeit, die Innovation zu skalieren
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/alice-de-koning-and-yrjo-koskinen-canada-cant-rely-on-pipelines-alone-its-time-to-scale-up-innovation
6 Kommentare
**TL;DR** – Canada’s prosperity can’t come from pipelines and raw exports alone. Despite strong research and talent, the country lags in turning ideas into global firms, losing graduates, selling startups early, and missing out on high-value innovation. Rivals like Switzerland and Sweden succeed by pairing research with commercialization, capital, and IP protection. To compete, Canada must reward risk-taking, close its scale-up gap, and invest in intangibles like software, brands, and design. The resources and talent are here, what’s missing is the ambition to build global champions.
Problem is our local investment community is too damn conservative for their own good. Can’t start a business if you can’t get capital.
It’s made worse by how the cost of living crisis means not even the „middle class“ has enough of their own capital to invest in an idea because literally every fucking dollar they earn goes to their landlord, their bank or one of the 3 oligargies in every other sector of our economy.
It’s easier to get a mortgage on a house than a business loan, and if you sit on that house for a couple years it’s more likely to raise in price by a couple hundred thousand dollars, and if it doesn’t you can rent it out and still come out ahead.
20 years ago I would say let’s follow America’s lead into the next generation, but today it’s let’s follow China’s lead. China is blowing up when it comes to energy and innovation. Empires come and go and we are witnessing the end of one. This is horse and buggy vs automotive all over fossil fuels vs electric.
I agree with you completely. That kind of thinking will help all of us not just feed into corporate greed and stock prices.👍
There’s no reason we couldn’t be innovative. We only really want to focus on that (as a society and not only as a government).
We took the easy way of exploiting our natural resources and exporting raw materials instead of using our own resources and exporting transformed products and services with more plus-value.
Just look at Sweden: with a population 4 times smaller than us, innovation is an integral part of their society, from education to business development. Everyone around the world knows of IKEA or Volvo. They even have their own fighter jets!
Sweden is #2 on the 2025 UN Global Innovation Index. Canada is in #17 !!!
True, we have the city of Waterloo that is essentially the innovation hub of Canada but that’s more an outlier than the norm.
Do you notice how the debate* about pipelines so rarely covers trivialities like “who is paying for this” and “is this economically viable”